Primary Sources: Japan Times Archives

Another recent acquisition of the Library is the digital Japan Times Archive, which provides access to the complete run (1897-2014) of this English-language daily published in Tokyo.

The archive contains a reported 490,000 pages of content, from 30,000 issues published over the 117-year history of the newspaper. The Japan Times was the first English-language newspaper in Japan to be put out by Japanese publishers and was for many years the only foreign-language newspaper in Japan. The paper maintained editorial independence for much of its history, though it was used as a propaganda tool for Imperial Japan during World War II. The paper went through occasional title changes, all of which are represented in the archive. The contents include:

The Japan Times (22 Mar 1897–1 Jan 1918)
The Japan Times & Mail (2 Apr 1918–10 Nov 1940)
The Japan Times & Advertiser / Japan Times Advertiser (11 Nov 1940–31 Dec 1942)
Nippon Times (1 Jan 1943–30 Jun 1956)
The Japan Times (1 Jul 1956–present)

Full text searching is enabled because the content has been OCR’d, but as with most digitized newspapers the OCR process is not error-free. You should be flexible in your searching and try variations of words. Read the help information to learn how to construct searches with *, +, and # operators.